Tag Archives: VMware

Two years ago at the 2017 Sydney and Melbourne UserCons, I spent time with a couple of the founders of Runecast, Stanimir Markov and Ched Smokovic and got to know a little more about their real time analytics platform for VMware based infrastructure. Fast forward to today and Runecast have continued to build on the their initial release and have continued to add features and enhancements. The most recent of those, which is the ability to report on a ESXi Hosts VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is currently in beta and will be released shortly.

Currently, Runecast checks hardware versions, drivers and firmware against existing VMware KB articles and provides proactive findings for known issues that could impact your servers. With this addition Runecast will now show the compliance status of hardware against the VMware HCL.

This feature alone literally replaces hours of work to extract the needed data and match each server from your environment against the HCL. Critically, it can inform you if, where, and why your vSphere environment is not supported by VMware because of Hardware Compatibility issues.

In terms of what it looks like, as from the screen shot above you can see the new menu item that give you the Compatibly Overview. Your hosts are listed in the main window pane and are shows as green or red depending on their status against the HCL.

Clicking on the details you are shows the details of the host against the HCL data. If the host is out of whack with the HCL you will get an explanation similar to what is seen below. (note in the BETA I have installed this was not

With this feature you can identify which component is incompatible and unsupported. From there it will also indicate what the supportability options are for you.

Runecast keep adding great features to their platform… and most of their features are ones which any vSphere admin would find very helpful. That is the essence of what they are trying achieve.

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A little over two years ago in Feburary of 2017 VMware released NSX-T 2.0 and with it came a variety of updates that looked to continue to push NSX-T beyond that of NSX-v while catching up in some areas where the NSX-v was ahead. The NSBU has had big plans for NSX beyond vSphere for as long as I can remember, and during the NSX vExpert session we saw how this is becoming more of a reality with NSX-T 2.4. NSX-T is targeted at more cloud native workloads which also leads to a more devops focused marketing effort on VMware’s end.

NSX-T’s main drivers relate to new data centre and cloud architectures with more hetrogeneality driving a different set of requirements to that of vSphere that focuses around multi-domain environments leading to a multi-hypervisor NSX platform. NSX-T is highly extensible and will address more endpoint heterogeneity in future releases including containers, public clouds and other hypervisors.

What’s new in NSX-T 2.4:

[Update] – The Offical Release Notes for NSX-T 2.4 have been releases and can be found here. As mentioned by Anthony Burke…

Actually wait for the release notes. You’ve covered nothing about what is included 😉

I only touch on the main features below…This is a huge release and I don’t think i’ve seen a larger set of release notes from VMware. There are also a lot of Resolved Issues in the release which are worth a look for those who have already deployed NSX-T in anger. [/Update]

While there are a heap of new features in NSX-T 2.4, for me one of the standout enhancements is the migration options that now exist to take NSX-v platforms and migrate them to NSX-T. While there will be ongoing support for both platforms, and in my opinion NSX-v still hold court in more traditional scenarios, there is clear direction on the migration options.

Infrastructure as Code and NSX-T:

As mentioned in the introduction, VMware is targeting cloud native and devops with NSX-T and there is a big push for being able to deploy and consume networking services across multiple platforms with multiple tools via the NSX API. At it’s heart, we see here the core of what was Nicira back in the day. NSX (even NSX-v) has always been underpinned by APIs and as you can see below, the idea of consuming those APIs with IaC, no matter what the tool is central to NSX-T’s appeal.

Conclusion:

It’s time to get into NSX-T! Lots of people who work in and around the NSBU have been preaching this for the last three to four years, but it’s now apparent that this is the way of the future and that anyone working on virtualization and cloud platforms needs to get familiar with NSX-T. There has been no better time to set it up in the lab and get things rolling.

For a more in depth look at the 2.4 release, head to the official launch blog post here.

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Now that AWS re:Invent 2018 has well and truly passed…the biggest industry shift to come out of the event from my point of view was the fact that AWS are going full guns blazing into the on-premises world. With the announcement of AWS Outposts the long held belief that the public cloud is the panacea of all things became blurred. No one company has pushed such a hard cloud only message as AWS…no one company had the power to change the definition of what it is to run cloud services…AWS did that last week at re:Invent.

Yes, Microsoft have had the Azure Stack concept for a number of years now, however they have not executed on the promise of that yet. Azure Stack is seen by many as a white elephant even though it’s now in the wild and (depending on who you talk to) doing relatively well in certain verticals. The point though is that even Microsoft did not have the power to make people truely believe that a combination of a public cloud and on premises platform was the path to hybridity.

AWS is a Juggernaut and it’s my belief that they now have reached an inflection point in mindshare and can now dictate trends in our industry. They had enough power for VMware to partner with them so VMware could keep vSphere relevant in the cloud world. This resulted in VMware Cloud on AWS. It seems like AWS have realised that with this partnership in place, they can muscle their way into the on-premises/enterprise world that VMware have and still dominate…at this stage.

Outposts as a Product Name is no Accident

Like many, I like the product name Outposts. It’s catchy and straight away you can make sense of what it is…however, I decided to look up the offical meaning of the word…and it makes for some interesting reading:

An isolated or remote branch

A remote part of a country or empire

A small military camp or position at some distance from the main army, used especially as a guard against surprise attack

The first definition as per the Oxford Dictionary fits the overall idea of AWS Outposts. Putting a compute platform in an isolated or remote branch office that is seperate to AWS regions while also offering the ability to consume that compute platform like it was an AWS region. This represents a legitimate use case for Outposts and can be seen as AWS fulling a gap in the market that is being craved for by shifting IT sentiment.

The second definition is an interesting one when taken in the context of AWS and Amazon as a whole. They are big enough to be their own country and have certainly built up an empire over the last decade. All empires eventually crumble, however AWS is not going anywhere fast. This move does however indicate a shift in tactics and means that AWS can penetrate the on-premises market quicker to extend their empire.

The third definition is also pertinent in context to what AWS are looking to achieve with Outposts. They are setting up camp and positioning themselves a long way from their traditional stronghold. However my feeling is that they are not guarding against an attack…they are the attack!

Where does VMware fit in all this?

Given my thoughts above…where does VMware fit into all this? At first when the announcement was made on stage I was confused. With Pat Gelsinger on stage next to Andy Jessy my first impression was that VMware had given in. Here was AWS announcing a direct competitive platform to on-premises vSphere installations. Not only that, but VMware had announced Project Dimension at VMworld a few months earlier which looked to be their own on-premises managed service offering…though the wording around that was for edge rather than on-premises.

VMware and Amazon are expanding their partnership to deliver a new, as-a-service, on-premises offering that will include the full VMware SDDC stack (vSphere, NSX, vSAN) running on AWS Outposts, a fully managed and configurable server and network installation built with AWS-designed hardware. VMware Cloud in AWS Outposts is VMware’s new As-a-Service offering in partnership with AWS to run on AWS Outposts – it will leverage the innovations we’ve developed with Project Dimension and apply them on top of AWS Outposts. VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts will be a subscription-based service and will support existing VMware payment options.

The reality is that on-premises environments are not going away any time soon but customers like the operating model of the cloud. More and more they don’t care about where infrastructure lives as long as a services outcome is achieved. Customers are after simplicity and cost efficiency. Outposts delivers all this by enabling convenience and choice…the choice to run VMware for traditional workloads using the familiar VMware SDDC stack all while having access to native AWS services.

A Managed Service Offering means a Mind shift

The big shift here from VMware that began with VMware Cloud on AWS is a shift towards managed services. A fundamental change in the mindset of the customer in the way in which they consume their infrastructure. Without needing to worry about the underlying platform, IT can focus on the applications and the availability of those applications. For VMware this means from the VM up…for AWS, this means from the platform up.

VMware Cloud on AWS is a great example of this new managed services world, with VMware managing most of the traditional stack. VMware can now extend VMware Cloud on AWS to Outposts to boomerang the management of on-premises as well. Overall Outposts is a win win for both AWS and VMware…however proof will be in the execution and uptake. We won’t know how it all pans out until the product becomes available…apparently in the later half of 2019.

IT admins have some contemplating to do as well…what does a shift to managed platforms mean for them? This is going to be an interesting ride as it pans out over the next twelve months!

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I had an issue with my VCSA today trying to upgrade to vCenter 6.7 Update 1 whereby the Management Interface Upgrade option was not detecting the update to upgrade the appliance to 6.7 Update 1. It was a similar issue to this VMwareKB, however the URL that is mentioned in that instance was already in the VCSA Settings.

My first instinct was to check the disk space and see if there where any pressures in that area. I did find that the /dev/sda3 partition was low on space, so I expanded the disk following advice given by Mark Ukotic. After a reboot and resize I had plenty of storage left, but still couldn’t trigger an update from the URL. At this point I did download the Update patch ISO from the VMware Patch center and loaded it up manually…however the issue of it not popping up automatically was annoying me.

As mentioned, the settings of the VCSA Update window has the following URL listed:

I was then able to rescan and choose from the list of updates for the VCSA.

And perform the upgrade from the Management Interface as first desired.

Interestingly enough, after the upgrade the default Update Repository was set to the one Matt provided for me.

This is the first time i’ve seen this behavior from the VCSA but I had reports of people being able to upgrade without issue. I’m wondering if it might be the particular build I was on, though that in it’s self was not picking up any patches to update to either. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to comment below.

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Last week I was looking to add the deployment of a local CentOS virtual machine to the Deploy Veeam SDDC Toolkit project so that it included the option to deploy and configure a local Linux Repository. This could then can be added to the Backup & Replication server. As part of the deployment I call the Terraform vSphere Provider to clone and configure the virtual machine from a pre loaded CentOS template.

As shown below, I am using the Terraform customization commands to configure VM name, domain details as well as network configuration.

In configuring the CentOS template i did my usual install of Open VM Tools. When the Terraform plan executes we applied the VM was cloned without issue, but it failed at the Guest Customizations part.

The error is pretty clear and to test the error and fix, I tried applying the plan without any VMware Tools installed. In fact without VMware Tools the VM will not finish the initial deployment after the clone and be deleted by Terraform. I next installed open-vm-tools but ended up with the same scenario of the plan failing and the VM not being deployed. For some reason it does not like this version of the package being deployed.

Next test was to deploy the open-vm-tools-deploypkg as described in this VMwareKB. Now the Terraform plan executed to the point of cloning the VM and setting up the desired VM hardware and virtual network port group settings but still failed on the custom IP and hostname components of the customisation. This time with a slightly different error.

The final requirement is to pre-install the perl package onto the template. This allows for the in guest customizations to take place together with VMware Tools. Once I added that to the template the Terraform Plan succeeded without issue.

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A question came up in the Veeam Forums this week about how you would backup the contents of a Content Library. As a refresher, content libraries are container objects for VM templates, vApp templates, and other types of files. Administrators can use the templates in the library to deploy virtual machines and vApps via vCenter. Using Content libraries results in consistency, compliance, efficiency, and automation when deploying workloads at scale.

Content Libraries are created and managed from a single vCenter, but can be shared to other vCenter Server instances. VM templates and vApps templates are stored as OVF file formats in the content library. You can also upload other file types, such as ISO images, text files, and so on, in a content library. It’s possible to create content libraries that are 3rd party hosted, such as the example here by William Lam looking at how to create and manage an AWS S3 based content library.

For those looking to store them locally on an ESXi datastore there is a way to backup the contents of the content library with a Veeam Backup & Replication File Copy job. This is a basic solution to the question posed in the Veeam Forums however it does work. With the File Copy, you can choose any file or folder contained in any connected infrastructure in Backup & Replication. For a Content Library stored on an ESXi datastore you just need to browse to the location as shown below.

The one caveat is that the destination can’t be a Veeam Repository. There is no versioning or incremental copy so every time the job is executed a full backup of the files is performed.

One way to work around this is to set the destination to a location that is being backed up in a Veeam Job or an Agent Job. However if the intention is to just protect the immediate contents of the library than have a full once off backup shouldn’t be an issue.

You can also create/add to a File Copy job from the Files view as shown above.

In terms of recovery, The File Copy job is doing a basic file copy and doesn’t know about the fact the files are part of a Content Library and as you can see, the folder structure that vCenter creates uses UIDs for identification. Because of this, if there was a situation where a whole Content Library was lost, it would have to be recreated in vCenter and then the imported back in directly from the File Copy Job destination folder location.

Again, this is a quick and nasty solution and it would be a nice feature addition to have this backed up natively…naming and structure in place. For the moment, this is a great way of utilizing a cool feature of Veeam Backup & Replication to achieve the goal.

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At VMworld 2018, myself and Michael Cade gave a session on automating and orchestrating Veeam on VMware Cloud on AWS. The premise of the session was to showcase the art of the possible with Veeam and VMware that resulted in a fully deployed and configured Veeam platform. We chose VMware Cloud on AWS for the demo to showcase the power of the Software Defined Datacenter with Veeam, however our solution can be deployed onto any vSphere platform.

Why Veeam with VMware Cloud on AWS:

I’ve have spent a lot of time over the past couple of months looking into VMware Cloud on AWS and working out just where Veeam fits in terms of a backup and recovery solution for it. I’ve also spent time talking to VMware sales people as well as solution providers looking to wrap managed services around VMC and the question of data protection is often raised as a key concern. There is a good article here that talks about the need for backup and how application HA or stretched clustering is not a suitable alternative.

Without prejudice, I truly believe that Veeam is the best solution for the backup and recovery of workloads hosted on VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs. Not only do we offer a solution that’s 100% software defines it’s self, but we can extend protection of all workloads from on-premises, through to the SDDC and also natively in AWS covering both backup, replication as well as offering the ability to use Cloud Connect to backup out to a Veeam Cloud and Service Provider. I’ll go into this in greater detail in a future post.

Veeam on the VMware Cloud on AWS Marketplace:

At the same time as our session on the Monday there was another session that introduced the VMware Cloud Marketplace that was announced in Technical Preview. As part of that launch, Veeam was announced as an initial software partner. This allows for the automated deployment and configuration of a Veeam Backup & Replication instance directly into a deployed SDDC and also configures an AWS EC2 EBS backed instance to be used as a Veeam Repository.

The VMware Cloud Marketplace will offer the ability to browse and filter validated third-party products and solutions, view technical and operational details, facilitate Bring Your Own License (BYOL) deployments, support commercial transactions, and deliver unified invoices. We plan to open Cloud Marketplace to a limited Beta audience following VMworld and are working on additional features and capabilities for future releases. We envision the Cloud Marketplace will quickly expand, introducing new third-party vendors and products over time and becoming the de-facto source for customers to extend the capabilities of VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Provider Partner environments.

Compared to what Michael and I showcased in our session, this is a more targeted vanilla deployment of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 with Update 3a into the SDDC. At the end of the process, you will be able to access the Veeam Console, have it connected to the VMC vSphere endpoint and have the EC2 Veeam repository added.

This is done via CloudFormation templates and a little bit of PowerShell embedded into the Windows Image.

Being embedded directly into the VMware Cloud Marketplace is advantageous for customers looking to get started quick with their data protection for workloads running on VMware Cloud o AWs. Look out for more collateral from myself, Veeam and VMware on protecting VMC with Veeam as well as a deeper look at our VMworld session which digs into the automation and orchestration of Veeam on VMware Cloud on AWS using Chef, Terraform, PowerShell and PowerCLI.

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VMworld 2018 has come and gone and after a couple of days recovery from the week that was, i’ve had time to reflect on what was a great week and an another great VMworld in Las Vegas. For me, the dynamic of what it is to be at a VMworld has changed. The week is not just about the event, the announcements or the sessions…but more about what myself and my team are able to achieve. While we are participants of VMworld we are also working and need to be adding value on all fronts.

This year I left Las Vegas with a sense of achievement and the belief that the week was extremely successful both personally and from a Veeam Product Strategy point of view. In this post (which is Part 2 of my VMworld 2018 recap) I am going to go over what went down with the VMware community during the event and close off with a quick Veeam roundup.

Community:

I felt like the community spirit was in full effect again at VMworld. Between all the sessions, parties and events my overall feeling was that there was a lot of community activity going on. Twitter it’s self came to life and everyones timelines where filling up with #VMworld media. The grass roots community still fuels a lot of VMware’s success and you can’t underestimate the value of influence and advocacy at this level. Certainly, Veeam and other vendors understand this and cater to supporting community events while looking after members with vendor branded swag.

One important thing I would like to highlight is the power of the local community and how something small can turn into something huge. My good friend from Australia, Tim Carman had an idea last year to create an As Built PowerShell Documentation script. He first presented it at his local VMUG…then a few months later he presented it at the Melbourne VMUG UserCon and last week, he presented it with Matt Allford in front of 500 plus people at VMworld. Not only that, but the session was voted into the daily top ten and is currently the second most downloaded via the online session download page!

Hackathon:

Another amazing thing that happened at VMworld was the team that I was lucky enough to be a member of took out the Hackathon. Aussie vMafia 2.0, lead by Mark Ukotic took out the main prize on the back of an idea to put a #PowerShell terminal in the #vSphere (H5) Client and running #PowerCLI commands. Again, what I was most pleased about with Mark, Tim and Matt’s success was exposure from the sessions and Hackathon win. They are great guys and well deserving of it. It goes down as one of my best VMworld highlights of all time!

Veeam Highlights and Sessions:

Finally to wrap things up, it was a great VMworld for Veeam. I spoke to a lot of customers and partners and it’s clear that our Availability Platform that’s driven through our strong ecosystem alliances is still very much resonating and seen to be leading the industry. Being hardware agnostic and software only carries massive weight and it was pleasing to have that validated by talking to customer and partners during the course of the event.

In terms of our sessions, we had two different breakouts. One covering some of the brilliant new features in Update 4 of Backup & Replication 9.5 presented by Danny Allan and Rick Vanover.

And myself and Michael Cade presented on automation and orchestration of Veeam on VMware Cloud on AWS. Michael talks about the session here, but in a nutshell we came up with a workflow that orchestrates the deployment of a Veeam Backup & Replication Server with Proxies onto a vSphere environment (VMC used in this case to highlight the power of the SDDC) and then deploys and configures a Veeam Linux Repository in AWS, hooks that into a VeeamPN extended network and then configures the Veeam Server ready to backup VMs.

Finally…it wouldn’t be VMworld without a Veeam party, and this year didn’t fail to live up to expectation. Held at the Omnia nightclub on Tuesday night it was well received and we managed to fill the club without the need to pull in a headline act. And as I tweeted out…

Wrap Up:

Overall, VMworld ticked a lot of boxes and was well received by everyone that I came across. IT’s been a good run of three VMworld’s in a row in Vegas, however it’s time to move back to where it all started for me in 2012 in San Fransisco. It’s going to be interesting going back to the Mascone Center and a city that hasn’t got the best reputation at the present moment due to social issues and the cost of accomodation is astronomical compared to Vegas. However, location is one thing…it’s what VMware and it’s ecosystem partners bring to the event. This year it worked! Hopefully next year will be just as successful.

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VMworld 2018 has come and gone and after a couple of days recovery from the week that was, i’ve had time to reflect on what was a great week and an another great VMworld in Las Vegas. In this post I wanted to break down what I saw as the major announcements at the 2018 event and highlight some of the cool stuff VMware is bringing out for their customers, partners and technology partners.

VMware have kept up the momentum from last years VMworld and have continued on their pivot from a hyper-visor company to one that truly spans a multi-platform ecosystem of partners and other technologies. This post again is all about VMware at VMworld…i’ll focus on the Veeam happenings and my community experiences at VMworld in part 2.

VMware Cloud on AWS:

I’m a believer! I am personally excited with what VMware have delivered here. The focus of my session on Automating and Orchestrating Veeam was around VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) utilising a Single Node SDDC for our live demo. Having presented at VeeamON with Emad Younis on VMC and Veeam I have since had my head deeply in the offering. VMware seem to be addressing the pricing concerns myself and others have and are now allowing smaller host deployments (from three to two later down the track) along with more flexible licensing.

The M5 release will feature NSX-T which offers a lot more hard core networking capabilities which will directly connect to AWS Direct Connect. The announcement of high-capacity storage option built into the vSAN cluster using Amazon EBS is an interesting one and an example of the mushing together of VMware and AWS technologies.

With all that said, I’m still not sure where this offering sits when compared to VCPP hosted IaaS and how it has the potential to impact that side of VMware’s business. That maybe a topic for a dedicated blog post…but not now.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware:

This came as a surprise, but is in itself an interesting announcement. Having the ability to run RDS on-premises with the ability to migrate/move the workloads to and from AWS opens up a number of possabilities. With support Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB databases it’s covering a lot of existing use cases. No doubt this is a mechanism for complete cloud transition, but the choice to run this on-premises or in a hybrid setup is genius.

vCloud Provider Announcements:

Having been on the beta program for the next version of vCloud Director I knew what was coming, but I didn’t think it would be announced at VMworld. Suffice to say the next version of vCD will be another significant one. Version 9.5 continues to build on the momentum of the 9.x releases and continues to enhance the platform as the flagship Cloud Management Platform for Service Providers.

New innovations include cross-site networking improvements powered by deeper integration with NSX and Initial integration with NSX-T. A full transition to an HTML5 UI for the cloud tenant with improvements to role-based access control. There is also going to be a virtual appliance option. I’m looking forward to this dropping later in the year and continuing to #LongLivevCD!

One thing to touch on as well is the native integrated data protection capabilities using Avamar. This is directly integrated into the vCD HTML5 UI via the extensibility plugin. I’ve had a lot of requests from service providers who use Veeam as their trusted availability platform for vCD if we will release similar functionality. At this stage, we can’t make any promises but it’s something getting face time at the top levels of our R&D and Product Management and Strategy teams.

There was also a new VMware Cloud Foundation version announced. Details here.

vSphere and vSAN:

vSAN continues to evolve and improve and there is also a lot to look forward to in the vSphere 6.7 Update 1. There is a new quickstart wizard that walks you through the setup of a cluster that includes a number of tasks that where previously not hard to install…but not as well thought out in terms of ease of use. Operationally, dealing with vSAN Firmware and driver updates has always been painful, but again this update looks to streamline that process by moving the functionality into the HTML5 vSphere Update Manager.

There has also been enhancements to maintenance mode activities, improved health checking and diagnostics as well as TRIM/UNMAP support that uses less storage through the process of automatic space reclamation. This can automatically reclaim capacity that is no longer used, reduces the capacity needed for workloads without administrator interaction.

In terms of vSphere, all administrative functions have been completed for the vSphere Client so in theory there should be no more switching between the old Flex and HTML5 clients. vSphere Platinum is a new edition of vSphere that combines vSphere Enterprise Plus along with AppDefense which is their SaaS based security product built to alert and remediate against anything that looks out of the norm. It seems like most vendors are releasing SaaS based offerings with Machine Learning behind them in this space as security tools…I do wonder if the market is flooded?

Other Notables:

Project Dimension looked interesting, but as with any VMware project I tend to wait for more concrete announcements closer to release. And it seems as though Edge computing is here to stay as a term. Remote offices are now the Edge!

Project Dimension will extend VMware Cloud to deliver SDDC infrastructure and hardware as-a-service to on-premises locations. Because this is will be a service, it means that VMware can take care of managing the infrastructure, troubleshooting issues, and performing patching and maintenance. This in turn means customers can focus on differentiating their business building innovative applications rather than spending time on day-to-day infrastructure management.

Speaking of the Edge, I did like the sound of the announcement around ESXi on 64bit ARM. VMware demonstrated ESXi on 64bit ARM running on a windmill farm at the Edge. VMware sees an opportunity to work with selected embedded OEMs to scope and explore opportunities for focused, ARM-enabled offering at the edge. This is the current 64bit ARM CPU architecture used on Apple TV 4 so we could have ESXi on AppleTVs in the near future!

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While preparing for my VMworld session with Michael Cade on automating and orchestrating the deployment of Veeam into VMware Cloud on AWS, we have been testing against the Single Host SDDC that’s been made available for on demand POCs for those looking to test the waters on VMware Cloud on AWS. The great thing about using the Single Host SDDC is it’s obviously cheaper to run than the four node production version, but also that you can spin it up and destroy the instance as many times as you like.

Single Host SDDC is our low-cost gateway into the VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid cloud solution. Typically purchased as a 4-host service, it is the perfect way to test your first workload and leverage the additional capability and flexibility of VMware Cloud on AWS for 30 days. You can seamlessly scale-up to Production SDDC, a 4-host service, at any time during the 30-days and get even more from the world’s leading private cloud provider running on the most popular public cloud platform.

To get started with the Single Host SDDC, you need to head to this page and sign up…you will get an Activation email and from there be able to go through the account setup. This big thing to note at the moment is that a US Based Credit Card is required.

There are a few pre-requisites before getting an SDDC spun up…mainly around VPC networking within AWS. There is a brilliant blog post here, that describes the networking that needs to be considered before kicking off a fresh deployment. The offical help files are a little less clear on what needs to be put into place from an AWS VPC perspective, but in a nutshell you need:

An AWS Account

A fresh VPC with a VPC Networking configured

At least three VPC Subnets configured

A Management Subnet for the VMware Objects to sit on

Once this has been configured in the AWS Region the SDDC will be deployed into the process can be started. First step is to select a region (this is dictated by the choices made at account creation) and then select a deployment type followed by a name for the SDDC.

The next step is to link an existing AWS account. This is not required at the time of setup however it is required to get the most out of the solution. This will go off and launch an AWS CloudFormation template to connect the SDDC to the AWS account. It creates IAM role to allow communication between the SDDC and AWS.

[Note] I ran into an issue initially where the default location for the CloudFormation template to be run out of was not set to the region where the SDDC was to be deployed into. Make sure that when you click on the Launch button you take not the the AWS region and change where appropriate by change the URL to the correct region.

After a minute or so, the VMware Cloud on AWS Create an SDDC page will automatically refresh as shown below

The next step is to select the VPC and the VPC subnets for the raw SDDC components to be deployed into. I ran into a few gotcha’s on this initially and what you need to have configured is the subnets configured to size as listed in the user guides and the post I linked to that covers networking, but you also need to make sure you have at least three subnets configured across different AWS Availability zones within the region. This was not clear, but I was told by support that it was required.

If the AWS side of things is not configured correctly you will see this error.

What you should see…all things being equal is this.

Finally you need to set the Management Subnet which is used for the vCenter, Hosts, NSX Manager and other VMware components being deployed into the SDDC. There is a default, but it’s important to consider that this should not overlap with any existing networks that you may look to extend the SDDC into.

From here, the SDDC can be deployed by clicking on the Deploy SDDC button.

[Note] Even for the Single Instance Node SDDC it will take about 120 minutes to deploy and you can not cancel the process once it’s started.

Once completed we can click into the details of the SDDC, which allows you to see all the relevant information relating to it and also allows you to configure the networking.

Finally, to access the vCenter you need to configure a Firewall rule to allow web access through the management gateway.

Once completed you can login to the vCenter that’s hosted on the VMware Cloud on AWS instance and start to create VMs and have a play around with the environment.

There is a way to automate a lot of what i’ve stepped through above…for that, i’ll go through the tools in another blog post later this week.